St2station
13K posts
@Steve_Sailer @dlondonwortel I think the great thriller and historical-fiction authors can be put on this list too. An Eric Ambler or Mary Renault knew they weren’t writing Tolstoy or Dickens, but for a few decades they cranked out well-crafted, informative entertainments for the Everyman and Everywoman.
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@Steve_Sailer @dlondonwortel Suppose we can add Richard Strauss to this list, who said of himself (in a rare attack of humility) “I am not a first-rate composer; but I am a first-rate second-rate composer.”
There are far worse fates for an artist.
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Give examples of first-rate second rate talents, and/or second rate first rate talents.
Any genre allowed (music writing film etc)
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Haven’t really experimented with AI tools for video generation because I know that if I went down that particular mineshaft there’s a good chance I’d never crawl back out…
Gene Parmesan@dsonoiki
You Are Not Alone. Vote Spencer Pratt.
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Very surprised the seagulls didn’t simply eat the cats
Enezator@Enezator
They installed machines in Türkiye to feed stray cats, and now some seagulls have learned how to meow hoping they’ll get food too 😭🐈
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@kynakwado “For lust of knowing what should not be known/We take the Golden Road to Samarkand” Summer
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@93vintagejones Really wish the Everyman’s Library would do a similar full, all-volumes printing of Macaulay’s ‘History of England.’
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The kind of decision you would spend the rest of your life regretting.
Román@Zmei_Hhsss
Considered selling, but given I flew across the Atlantic with them — will find time to read. The prose is just too beautiful not to.
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@EricRichards22 Many NE Corridor Americans are really allergic to the concept of ‘One person/couple will pick up this tab, and then next time we do this, another person/couple will.’ It’s not first-class airline tickets or a hotel booking, for pete’s sake…
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There's a vortex to hell that opens when it is millenial, jewish, NYer, finance types trying to do venmo spreadsheet accounting at the dinner table
B Brixwood@populusaigeiros
Watching women try to split a bill with each other should be a genre
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@ZambeziOutpost The settlers at Jamestown in the 1600s and 1610s spent a lot of time worrying that a Spanish force would fall upon them with fire and sword, as it had on those poor French Huguenots who’d tried to plant a colony on Florida in the 1560s.
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@ZambeziOutpost “Right, one last thing: you’re not planting a colony on land already claimed for centuries by one of our greatest rival powers, right?”
Scotland:
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Some good NYTs articles on Cuba. A topical book rec: this tremendous diplomatic history and collection of documents on the long history of US back channel negotiations with Castroite Cuba.
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Trump will be 80 in a few weeks and Old Dog, New Tricks etc, but you’d think at least some of the people around him would know by now that as with Europe, there are places and races in America where Trump’s best ‘intervention’ would be complete and utter public silence.
Daily Mail@DailyMail
Donald Trump is considering endorsing Spencer Pratt for LA mayor, sources claim, as underdog ex-reality star steamrolls opposition trib.al/LO5q0ky
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Used to keep sneaking one here and there over time, until my mom pulled the box out for company and opened it to a row of little black empty sleeves.
Surprise!
Retro Coast@RetroCoast
Do you remember After Eight mints? #1980s
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@WHerzogovina Rhett, claiming the Peacock Throne, by right of conquest….
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Your obviously anti-orientalist wife will tell you with a straight face that $7500 is too much for an armchair
HerodotusWave@HerodotusWave
Peacock style armchair.
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@anglopjdst Don’t neglect the follow-up volume on the Third (and non-aligned) World.
Neither is really a straight-through sort of read, but they’re great to dip into.
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crawl over glass to have what you have, and it’s a sort of sin to not do your best to maintain it, and guard against the flab, and try to avoid as much as possible the seemingly-daily conspiracy to poison you that is the modern WEIRD dietary (and pharmacological) landscape.
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having two arms and two legs and your health is truly a gift, and you have a sort of duty to yourself as a healthy human being to strive and perfect, as much as possible, the physical bit every bit as much as the mind bit. If you know people with physical disabilities, they’d
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“The well-formed mind, in command of a well-maintained body” was the Greek ideal, and the Romans carried its torch in ‘Mens sana in corpore sano,’ and for all of Christianity’s occasional doubts about the body bit of the ledger, it retains its power.
Cheesy perhaps, but
Dr. Will@codechallenged
It feels GOOD to be WORTHY as you’ve BUILT yourself to be
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